ABSTRACT
Buildings embody social status, wealth, and power. They also contain within themselves a little-recognized trail of extractive impacts and human violence. By considering examples of prominent recent developments, this chapter makes this trail visible and proposes a method by which others can do the same for buildings and infrastructure in any location. This chapter documents and reflects on the ways in which the act of construction depends on violence and/or extraction, and then considers how to reveal the embedded social and social justice impacts of multiple aspects of a project’s life-cycle, working through considerations such as investor priorities and distance, site choice and acquisition, design and review methods, material components choice and sourcing, methods of site development, construction and operations labor, resource use and waste, ongoing community use and impacts, vacancy, and end-of-life transitions. In seeking to reframe an architectural or infrastructural object as a socio-ecological force first and a material thing second, this essay concludes by proposing a set of interlinked actions for getting beyond the extractive status quo in the built environment, and makes the case for accountability in a scale of harm not currently addressed by the most commonly used green building certification schemes.
